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not on a par with MS Office???

I am not sure I agree with your statement "While LibreOffice isn't yet up to par with Microsoft Office...". My wife has written her PhD in LibreOffice. She is currently working in publishing. Prior to that she taught English at the University level for 15 years. She has extensive experience using both MS Word and LibreOffice Writer. I have used Calc, Impress, Excel, and PowerPoint extensively myself. Writer, Calc, and Impress are at least as good as the comparable parts of MS Office.

Ok. I'll tell you what is missing from libreoffice. Convenience tools/scripts for niche applications. For example I was an economics major in college and they had a whole suite of built in tools (that you could enable) to automate generation of various statistics. Some of the tables I could easily recreate in LibreOffice, some it was way quicker to walk to a computer lab and use Microsoft office to do the work and then import it into LibreOffice latter.

LibreOffice has no good tutorials for using Base. None of them tell you how to customize querry's/inputs/etc. They only cover the automatic generation of user interface (There is allot of tutorials just telling you to click next->next->next) Which has made that part of Libreoffice useless to me.

Those are the only two areas where Microsoft Office wins. If you don't want to use base or don't need some niche tools for your profession, then LibreOffice is perfect.

I am not sure I agree with your statement "While LibreOffice isn't yet up to par with Microsoft Office...". My wife has written her PhD in LibreOffice. She is currently working in publishing. Prior to that she taught English at the University level for 15 years. She has extensive experience using both MS Word and LibreOffice Writer. I have used Calc, Impress, Excel, and PowerPoint extensively myself. Writer, Calc, and Impress are at least as good as the comparable parts of MS Office.

Writer is pretty much the only part of LO that is nearly on-par with MS Office, and I'd say it only recently reached to that point. Writer is still missing some features that make the program more user friendly, but it overall still functions nicely. I agree with Cyborg16 about how Calc isn't as good. Calc lacks some necessary features, its documentation is weak, and it performs poorly with large spreadsheets (involving tens of thousands of entries). LO Impress is also... unimpressive, and I have never known anyone who uses Base.

Just FYI, I'm a big supporter of LO but I can admit it isn't the best thing out there. One of the only reasons MS was so successful was because of Office.

The only part of my Kubuntu desktop I don't like is Libreoffice. Its unreasonably unbelievably slow. Look so much ugly. And it has horrible local problems; my native Bangla(Bengali) translation was previously supported by OO.O 2 but OO.O 3 breaks translation. Somehow Libreoffice still thing the support is there and show boxes in all the menus. I had to set local en-US after which it show english menus. The gui is horrible.

I generally use Google Docs and this web app is far more superior then Libreoffice. I hope the situation improved with Libreoffce 4 but i am not putting my hopes hi.

tens of thousands??

Originally Posted by schmidtbag

I agree with Cyborg16 about how Calc isn't as good. Calc lacks some necessary features, its documentation is weak, and it performs poorly with large spreadsheets (involving tens of thousands of entries). LO Impress is also... unimpressive, and I have never known anyone who uses Base.

Admittedly I probably have not pushed Calc as hard as some. If I have serious statistics to do, I generally switch to R rather than using a spreadsheet.

fair comparison?

a ten years old version of exell is more speedy than calc... You don't need to do any spectacular calculations to press calc, a little to big spreedshet, and a old computer goes down on knees..

The performance of a 10 year old version of Excel is probably not a fair comparison to the current version of Calc. I am sure that Excel 2010 is slower than Excel 2000. For what it's worth, I have my checkbook in Calc and it is several thousand lines with multiple formulas. It seems to work fine with that, although I am running it on a modern processor, as opposed to a 486 or something.